Nuns in Essex were warned to avoid garments that would “nourish the fires of
sexual anticipation” in a 1,300-year-old book of advice now up for auction.

They were held up as paragons of virtue, but one congregation of Essex nuns appear to have needed some pointers on how to conduct themselves.

In a book of advice for the cloistered women written more than 1,300 years ago, they were reminded of the benefits of virginity, warned of the sin of pride, and cautioned against wearing garments which “set off” the body.

The guidance came from the Anglo-Saxon cleric Aldhelm in a text dedicated to the abbess nuns of Barking Abbey, the oldest surviving version of which is now up for sale.

In the work, De Laude Virginitatis [In Praise of Virginity], the author tells the nuns that abstinence from sex is not enough - their “stainlessness of bodily virginity” must be accompanied by a “chastity of the spirit” if they are to avoid the “untamed impulses of bodily wantonness”.

Addressing the issue of clothing, he writes: “If you dress yourself sumptuously and go out in public so as to attract notice, if you rivet the eyes of young men to you and draw the sighs of adolescents after you, and nourish the fires of sexual anticipation ... you cannot be excused as if you were of a chaste and modest mind.”

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Warning that both nuns and clergymen are dressing inappropriately, he adds: “It shames me to speak of the bold impudence of conceit and the fine insolence of stupidity which are found both among nuns who abide under the rule of a settlement, and among the men of the Church … With many-coloured vestments and with elegant adornments, the body is set off and the external form decked out limb by limb.”

As well as lifestyle advice, Aldhelm - an energetic evangelist and early supporter of women’s education - includes biographies of female saints famed for their virginity who he holds up as role models, including Scholastica, the patron saint of nuns and twin sister of St Benedict; Christina, tortured to death for her faith by her pagan father; and Dorothy, executed for her Christianity after turning down a marriage proposal.

Written in Latin in the seventh century, the book is the first known text from England to be aimed at a female readership. At the time, Barking was a country village outside London and its abbey, founded in 666AD, was home to generations of nuns for more than 800 years.

Whilst Aldhelm had no ecclesiastical authority over the abbey, his advice would have been heeded because he was a noted scholar of his day, of royal blood, who founded two monasteries and served as an abbot and a bishop.

The four pages up for auction at Sotheby’s next month are inscribed on vellum - high quality parchment made from sheep skin or calf hide – from a copy of the book produced in around 800AD, and believed to have been owned at one stage by St Dunstan, a tenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury. They are expected to fetch £500,000.

Timothy Bolton, a specialist in western medieval manuscripts at Sotheby’s, said: “Aldhelm’s work is remarkable because there simply aren’t any texts by English authors addressed to women before this.

"He expects the nuns to study and understand his sophisticated writings, raising the bar of education for women to the same level of men, becoming the first English feminist author.”

The extract forms part of an auction of 60 rare manuscripts, spanning more than five millennia, that are expected to fetch more than £2 million in total.

They include fragments of Homer’s The Iliad dating to the year of Christ’s birth which were used by the Egyptians to wrap around a mummy; a document belonging to the father of King Harold, the last Anglo Saxon king; and the earliest surviving text of one of the most important passages from the New Testament, St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.

They will be sold by Martin Schoyen, a Norwegian collector and heir to a shipping and transport business.

Dr Christopher de Hamel, the fellow librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and an expert on ancient manuscripts, said: “This sale is exceptional in telling the story of Western script from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages. It contains the bare bone relics of the history of the English language.”

The sale includes The Godwine Charter, drawn up for Earl Godwine, the most powerful English lord in the decades before the Norman Conquest and the father of King Harold, who was defeated and killed at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Dated c. 1013 to 1020 and written on vellum in Anglo Saxon, the document details Earl Godwine’s sale of a swine pasture, believed to be in Kent, to one of his tenants, Leofwine the Red, for “forty pence and two pounds and an allowance of eight ambers of corn”.

Expected to fetch up to £250,000 at auction, it is one of the rarest surviving Anglo Saxon texts from before the Norman Conquest, after which Old English, replaced by Latin and French, ceased to be the language of officialdom.

The sale will also include the Wyman Fragment, the earliest surviving version of an excerpt from St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, widely acknowledged as one of the most famous documents in the history of Christianity.

Dating from the late third century when Christianity was still an illegal cult in the Roman empire, the vellum fragment written in Greek comprises Romans 4:23-5:3 on one side, and on the other, Romans 5:8-13, including the crucial passage on the justification by faith which forms the core of the Epistle and of the theology of Christianity: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

For this passage of the Epistle, the Wyman Fragment is universally accepted as the earliest surviving version and is expected to fetch up to £200,000 at auction.

The fragment was reportedly found in the early 20th century by a group of Arabs at Fustât, in north-eastern Cairo, Egypt, near the site of the Roman fortress of Babylon.

Mr Schoyen acquired it in 1988 from the heirs of the American anthropologist, Dr Leland Wyman, who bought it from an antiquities dealer in Cairo in 1950.

Fragments from Homer’s The Iliad dating from the year of Christ's birth will also feature in the sale. Experts believe the papyrus fragments were once part of a scroll once used by the ancient Egyptians to wrap around a mummy, which survived in the sands of North Africa.

They were first acquired by the Austrian conservator, Dr Anton Fackelmann, in Cairo in 1969 as part of a mummy cartonage. Mr Schoyen acquired them from his heirs in 1998 and they are estimated to fetch £30,000 at auction.